Tarnished by Julia Crouch

shook the thought from her mind. She was over-glamorising her situation. She just had a poor memory, that was all.
    The PARTYBOYZ network, infuriatingly slow at the best of times, took ages to load her page; she sat looking at a blank screen for what seemed like an hour. Then the blue header bar appeared and she saw, wearily, that she had four new friend requests. More girls she wished gone from her life.
    But of course there was nothing from Raymond.
    She had exhausted Google, too. His name returned quite a few results, and she had written to the Raymonds whose addresses were listed and who seemed to be about the right age. She received a few replies in the SAE she had enclosed in each letter, but, while they showed sympathy for her situation, none was her father. She supposed she should go and turn up on the doorsteps of those who hadn’t got back to her. But, with some as far away as Durham, Aberdeen and even California, the expense of doing so was beyond her, especially with such a slim chance of success.
    It was hopeless. It was a big world and she was never going to find her father.
    As she shut the whirring, clicking computer down, the old familiar feeling crept up on her.
    She was useless.

Six
    ‘I do miss him, you know, Meggy. Oh, devils. This is all skew-whiff.’
    Two weeks had passed, Peg had got no nearer to arriving at an answer to the problem of what to do with her grandmother and her aunt, and the decline in Doll’s thought processes seemed to be accelerating.
    They were sitting together in the bungalow lounge and Doll was looking down critically at the mess of items on the hospital-style wheeled table suspended over her chair. She had bought it many years ago for Jean, but it hadn’t really fitted over her, even back then. Now it wouldn’t have a chance. Never one to entertain waste, Doll had taken the table for herself, using it to store the essentials of her daily routine: tissues, the TV remote, three pairs of smeared and greasy glasses, a prayer book, a tin of sticky humbugs, a magnifying glass. She also kept her pencil case to hand, and two elastic-band-bound bundles of jotters full of diagrams and notes – her Commonplace Books.
    She had always kept these notebooks, maintaining that they helped her keep her ‘bearings’. Peg had been taught the habit too, although it had tapered off for her some time in her teenage years, and she had lost or thrown away her early efforts. Her new red notebook was, in some way, an attempt at a revival, she supposed.
    As with everything else, Doll had of course held on to all hers. Filled with personal observations, recipes, knitting patterns and little drawings that reminded her, for example, how to wire a plug, or how to bone out a chicken, they were sort of illustrated diaries. Until recently, she had kept them tucked away. ‘Private and personal’, she called them, and Peg understood that to look in them would be as bad as spying on her naked. But with her fading focus, Doll had taken to leaving her current efforts open and visible, and Peg had unavoidably seen that they now were filled with indecipherable, shaky spider handwriting and random doodlings. If these were her bearings, then here was evidence of how rapidly she was slipping away from them.
    ‘Who is it you miss, Nan?’ Peg asked. Remembering Jean’s warnings, Peg hoped she wasn’t about to bring Keithy up again.
    ‘This goes here , not there .’ Doll tutted at the objects in front of her and shifted them around. ‘Have you seen my thingamabob?’
    ‘Which one?’
    ‘This.’ Doll reached for her lipstick, which had its own place next to a tiny gilt hand mirror. ‘Raymond. I miss Raymond of course.’ She took the top off the lipstick and, using the mirror, drew a line as shaky as her handwriting round her mouth. ‘He’s been gone for days, hasn’t he?’
    ‘Years I should say,’ Peg said.
    Bloody years.
    ‘Oh, what did you do to your hair, dear?’ Doll said, reaching up and